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How to be productive with almost any text editor

What makes us productive when working with code in the editor? Every day, there
is a new shining plugin, that allows us to do something useful by pressing only
2 keystrokes. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against plugins. Hell, I have at
least 40 of them (https://git.io/vrg64).

But, are all of them equally useful? I am certain that some tricks outperform
others in terms of productivity (20% results in 80% boost). These could be
features, built into the editor. You just don’t know about them. Here, I’ve
tried to collect the most important ones, which don’t require you to read a
pile of docs and much time to learn.

There is no research (not to my knowledge) to backup the list below. If you
think I missed something, leave a comment or two.

In addition, I’ve compared the 5 most popular editors (vim, emacs, idea,
sublime text and atom). I hope it will be interesting for you to see how your
editor is doing relative to others.

Your humble servant is using Vim at his regular job, so you may notice a
certain predisposition. But I try to be open - the second attempt to master
Spacemacs? https://github.com/google/xi-editor ? Who knows..

You can easily switch to the actual terminal using Ctrl + z (this will suspend
the editor) and get back by entering fg. However, I would say that it is not
the same as having a terminal emulator running in an editor’s window below. The
reason is simple - context. Most often, you’ll want to look at the output of
some command and the code at the same time. For example, seeing an error’s
stack trace and the code at the same time is far better than performing these
actions in turn (you could easily forget the exact line number or some other
detail).

Another advantage of having a terminal emulator: copy-pasting between the
terminal emulator and your code is much easier, and you get completion in the
code for things in the terminal (thanks to
somebodddy).